Rakuten India to step up hiring, have 3,000 employees by 2023

Japanese conglomerate Rakuten will almost double its India workforce to 3,000 by 2023, as the country becomes a key market to build products and services for its global initiatives, Rakuten India CEO Sunil Gopinath has told Moneycontrol.

The e-commerce giant has about 1,700 employees in India and 500 of them were hired in the last year.

“Rakuten is all in India. The kind of technologies, products and services that we have delivered for Rakuten global has been a really successful initiative for us,” Gopinath said on September 15.

“And secondly, as we grow and scale, India is where Rakuten is comfortable with respect to hiring the next level of talent and scale.”

Gopinath was talking to Moneycontrol on the eve of the launch of SixthSense, a Software-as-a-Service product that provides businesses end-to-end visibility of the entire IT environment, from development to business operations.

The product was developed at the company’s centre in Bengaluru. Rakuten is in talks with multiple enterprises in fintech, e-commerce and also government for the adoption of the product.

According to Rakuten executives, the market for products like SixthSense is $25-30 billion globally and is also growing rapidly in India.

The company will compete with platforms like Cisco’s AppDynamics in this space. The product was built by the company's data science and AI team with 300 people.

India was a key market for the company, Gopinath said.  While he did not share the revenue contribution from India, he said critical projects were being built from the country.

“The entire architecture of Rakuten Pay, which is equivalent to the likes of PhonePe or Amazon Pay, is being built completely by the India team,” he said.

A lot of key components for global products and businesses —Rakuten TV, Rakuten Music and digital media streaming products and Rakuten App Store— were being developed in India, he said.

“At Rakuten, we are building an NFT marketplace. All these are being built by India. All of them have top line and bottom line contributions. So I would say India has a high contribution,” Gopinath said, referring to non-fungible tokens which are all the rage.

Getting talent, however, remains a challenge and the company is seeing inflation in salaries.

“Many times now the approval comes to me, salaries are almost 100-200 percent higher than what they are making right now. So we do end up making some offers like that but most of the time we stick to industry standards,” Rakuten India COO Naren Narayana said.

The company has built a data science platform to train talent in-house instead of hiring laterally.